Breathing for the First Time
by Mistress of Sarcasm
Summary: She's just another rich kid whose world has been rocked by the commoner in their midst...


I never saw myself writing an OHSHC fic, but when inspiration hits, what can you do?

Disclaimer: No, I don't own Ouran High School Host Club, I could _never_ come up with anything so funny.

* * *

She's a regular. 

(She is nameless and beautiful and her father is the owner of some grand company and her mother is dutiful and kind and condescending. She has an older sister already out in the world, married to some son of her father's business friend, with a mansion and two bright-eyed, spoiled brats and more dresses than her huge closet can hold and empty eyes and a hollow laugh. She knows this is the same fate that waits for her as soon as her father decides she's old enough, but that doesn't matter right now, because right now she's free and young and silly and giggle-some and just a little bit shallow, but getting deeper each day.)

No part of 'future plans' means anything right now, not when she's in the Host Club.

Not when she's talking to Fujioka-kun.

She likes Fujioka-kun the best, out of anyone else she's ever talked to, because Fujioka-kun looks right into her eyes and Fujioka-kun has such a charming smile and Fujioka-kun is _realer_ than anyone else in this whole room, in this whole school.

Fujioka-kun is realer than anyone in her careful structured and insanely rich and violently shallow world.

It's Fujioka-kun she can talk to about her silly, frivolous dreams (that aren't so useless). It's Fujioka-kun who encourages her when she secretly sends money to a starving child in Africa. It's Fujioka-kun who holds her as she cries when she gets the letter saying the child, (nameless, faceless, unimportant, everything to her,) is dead.

It's the tragedy, the first time death, real, all-powerful Death has entered her world and it scares her, but Fujioka-kun tells her it's alright, tells her there are others she can help, others she can save, others she can give an education and a home and food and clean water to. (Fujioka-kun gives her a smile, a real smile, full of understanding and empathy and nothing like the forced smile of her father or the empty, strained one her sister gives her each year at Christmas.) And Fujioka-kun tells her about Death, about tragedy and pain and loss (and Fujioka-kun talks about _closure_, about living on, even after the pain, even after the sleepless nights spent choking incoherent words into a pillow stained with tears over one little nameless boy with dark skin and his ribs showing.)

And so she lives on, and sends money to his family, to the little brothers and sister he looked after, to the siblings who had nowhere to turn. (She pens them ink promises of protection and kindness and hope and strength to live on, even after pain.)

Fujioka-kun is proud of her and of her will to keep going, and of her eyes that are wide open to world and all its horrors and all its greatness (and they were half shut until now, seeing only what her sheltered vision allowed her to see.) But they are wide open now, wide enough for her to see everything, good and bad and wonderful and terrible and perfect and flawed.(And all this is because of one nameless faceless little boy who the world didn't know existed, but she loved, loved with the desperation of a mother, who now lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in Africa.)

When she sees a picture, of three boys and a little girl, posing before a school, stomachs full and eyes bright with love, accompanied by a tiny, messy note of four 'thank you's', she proves the depth her heart has been forced to acquire and falls to her knees and cries, cries, cries. (Fujioka-kun vaguely understands, understands the love that is reflected in her eyes, because Fujioka-kun is so _real_, and her whole being aches to be as real as Fujioka-kun, to marry for love and not money, to collapse at the end of a hard days work, to feel the _satisfaction_ of a hard days work, to breathe for once in her life, breathe the air outside of her sheltered, elitist bubble.)

She wants, more than anything in the world, to be _real_.

So she is.

She takes a job in the summer, she works herself to the bone, cleaning and running errands and smiling at customers even when her head is pounding and her eyes itch with sleep. She earns a meager amount but the sole fact that it's _hers_, something she put her sweat and blood and tears into earning, gives her a sense of pride she's never had before. (When she relates all this to Fujioka-kun, Fujioka-kun nods in understanding, because Fujioka-kun knows what it feels like to work for something, to pour hours and hours of your life into something, until it's so much yours that it's a part of you. Fujioka-kun knows that there's no feeling in the whole wide _world_ that can compare to it.)

And she feels her heart swell when Fujioka-kun smiles that smile at her because for the first time in her life, she's _real_, she breathing the air, unsaturated with expensive perfumes and stuffy with silk and linen and feathers and jewels and too many dresses and shoes and gloves and all the other little things she doesn't need, doesn't want, and still possesses. For the first time, there's a sense of accomplishment, of pride, of having done something just for her, with her own two hands.

Her pride shines through as she laughs and smiles with Fujioka-kun and talks in half seriousness about the Peace Core and the United Nations and her dreams to prove in her own little mind that the world is _round_. Fujioka-kun applauds the dreams her father called silly and tells her to aim for whatever she wants, and she's even realer than before, sitting here, drinking commoner's coffee (she likes the stuff; leaves a warm taste in her mouth), eating little snacks that she pops in her mouth (it's undignified and impolite and improper for her to eat like that and she loves it), talking about the Amazon and the Congo and the Sahara and the stone temples of South America.

(And she's as real as Fujioka-kun was the first time she met her, a short-haired girl in something resembling a boys uniform and untidy hair with glasses; a commoner in a palace, a pauper in a princes' world, calling her, the princess, a shallow little girl with frivolous dreams and no sense of reality.)

She looks around her, at all the shallow little princesses in pale yellow, with no idea of the reality outside of their own incredibly limited worlds, and thanks the gods that Haruhi-chan was there to pull her out of her stupidity.

* * *

(Because now she's real, and breathing for the first time…)

* * *

Just to make everything clear: 

Yes, this girl knows Haruhi's a girl, and yes, she met Haruhi on the first day, before any of the hosts did.

This is basically from the point of view of a femal student at Ouran, going from being a shallow little rich girl into a mature young woman through her interactions with Haruhi, who is unlike anyone she has ever met before. The girl, who is nameless and is acknowledged as nameless in the story, is thrown for a loop by Haruhi's blunt words. I place their meeting in one of the libraries Haruhi tried to study in before she went to the Host Club. She seemed to be in a rather bad mood, and I imagined up a brief interaction between her and some unknown girl. The girl was probably complaning about something, or gushing about things that Haruhi would consider useless and stupid. The girl asked Haruhi her opinion, and, being the unintentionally blunt and sometimes hurtful person that she is, Haruhi would tell the girl how useless she thought the subject was and how frivolous she thought the girl was. And, chasing after the strange student, the girl caught Haruhi fixing her shirt and discovering she was a girl. Imagine our princess' surprise later that day when, while attending the Host Club, she saw that same rude student? Well, of course she'd have to designate Haruhi and find out what was going on. And, finding the strange cross-dresser with the blunt tongue and kind heart interesting, the girl would simply having to keep coming back to talk to Haruhi, little by little growing up and deepening the depth she already had in her mind and heart.

At the beginning of the fanfic, she's a somewhat shallow person, wanting to be free of the burdens and responsibilities she knows her father can't wait to thrust on her as soon as she's old enough. She's already seen the result of it in her sister, and she fears it, but she's afraid to break out of her 'sheltered bubble' and do something to take control of her life. She seem to be one of those people whose lives have already been planned for them.

But by the end of the story, she's, in her own words, 'real'. She's broken out of her bubble, gotten a job, worked like a commoner, and become as 'real' as the person she admired: Haruhi.

Though I didn't give her a name, I rather like this character. I hope you've enjoyed her as well.

MoS


End file.
